The Big Rock Candy Mountain Read Free Page A

Norgaard said, “how’d you like to go to a ballgame?”
    He was sitting at the kitchen table opening a jar of gamelost with a screwdriver. Elsa turned from the stove.
    â€œAre you going?”
    â€œThey couldn’t play without me,” Karl said. ,“I’ve closed the store for every ballgame in fifteen years.”
    â€œSure,” she said. “I’d love to.”
    He bore down with the screwdriver, prying at the lid. The blade slipped, and he leaped up with a startled howl. “Fand slyta!” he said. He shook his fingers, and the blood welling from his gouged palm spattered on the floor. “Heste lort!” Karl said, almost jumping up and down. For a full minute he swore savagely in Norwegian, looked at Elsa, bent his lips into a baffled, half-humorous smirk, and looked back at his hand.
    She came running with the iodine bottle and soused the wound. Karl swore again. “Shame on you,” she said.
    â€œWell, hell,” Karl said. He looked at the deep gouge in his palm and shook his head incredulously. “You haven’t got any business knowing what I said,” he said. “That’s the trouble, having a Norske girl around.”
    Elsa giggled. “Anyway you sounded good and mad,” she said. “Norwegian swearing sounds ten times worse than English, somehow. It’s just like ripping canvas.”
    â€œI guess you’d swear too,” he said. “Dug my whole damn hand out.”
    â€œIf there was any of that smelly old cheese on the screwdriver you’ll be infected sure,” Elsa said. She tore a strip off a clean cloth and started bandaging.
    â€œYou mean you don’t like gamelost?”
    Elsa made a face. “Erling put some on my knife once, just stuck the knife in the jar and then laid it beside my plate, and I was sick for two hours.”
    â€œYou’re a traitor,” Karl said. “You don’t like ludefisk either.”
    â€œNo, nor herrings.”
    He shook his pink head over her. “But you like ballgames?”
    â€œBallgames are all right.”
    â€œVell, you batter like dem,” Karl said. “You yoost batter like dem.”
    He went out to the store muttering, shouting back that she yoost batter be raddy at two o‘clock, or a little before, and she saw him stomping through the sweet clover crosslots to the store, holding his gouged hand tenderly against his stomach.
    It was a blistering day. The ground, when they walked out at two o‘clock, was dry and baked, with cracks splitting through the yellow grass of the yard. What had once been a mud puddle in the road was caked into a hundred cupped plates laid together like a Chinese puzzle. Elsa picked one up; it took all the strength of her fingers to break it. Around them the sweet clover, just drying into clusters of seeds, was bone-stiff and dusty. West of the town three whirlwinds raced and dipped and lifted over the flats.
    They walked past the two grain elevators, across the cindery, fire-bitten tracks. On the other side a tier of crude seats was already well filled. Buggies lined the edge of the field, crowded with women under big parasols of fringed canvas faded from the fierce sun. There was a persistent flash of paper fans. A booth wound with red, white, and blue bunting was doing a land-office business in lemonade and pop and ice cream. There were bottles and papers littered along the weedy edge of the diamond.
    Standing below the plank seats, Elsa felt people’s eyes on her. Men spoke to Karl, and he grinned, squinting up into the sun, saying, “Hello Gus, hello George, hello. Ought to be a hot game.”
    â€œWe got it on ice,” somebody said, and there was a laugh.
    Feeling conspicuous, Elsa stood silently under her big hat while her uncle picked out a place in the stands. Then someone was calling from a buggy over on the first base line: “Come on over here. You’ll melt down to grease in that